Microsoft says its prototype Deepfish mobile web browser makes it easier to display and read web pages on devices with small screens.
(Microsoft Corp.) Microsoft unveiled the browser Wednesday at O'Reilly Media Inc.'s showcase for emerging technologies, the ETech conference in San Diego, Calif.

"Think about your mobile browsing experience today," Gary William Flake, director of Microsoft Live Labs, said in a written statement. "It's often less than intuitive, the pages don't look like what you've come to expect on the desktop and it takes a long time for a page to load. Deepfish aims to solve that problem."

Deepfish maintains the page layout, rather than reformatting it to fit a small screen, which can sometimes interfere with the context that information on those pages may require for proper understanding or ease of use. For example, menus and other navigation elements are sometimes rendered unusable when a web page is reformatted to fit a smaller screen.

For its 10th anniversary, Yahoo Mail is upping the ante to maintain its position as the leading free e-mail service in the world. It's bet: infinity.

"We will begin offering everyone unlimited e-mail storage starting in May 2007," said John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail, in a blog post on Tuesday.

When it launched in 1997, Yahoo Mail offered users 4 Mbytes of storage. Then came the information explosion. In 2004, storage capacity was raised to 100 Mbytes. A year later, it was 1 Gbyte.

Google's Gmail currently offers 2.8 Gbytes of storage to its users, an amount that has been creeping upward since the service debuted with 1 Gbyte. Google watchers speculate that some sort of competitive answer to Yahoo's announcement may come on April 1st, the third anniversary of Gmail.

Windows Live Mail offers 2 Gbytes of storage. MSN Hotmail offers 1 Gbyte for its free plan.

Yahoo Mail has long been the most popular free e-mail service worldwide. In February, it received some 243.4 million visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix. Microsoft's MSN Hotmail and Windows Live came in a close second, with 233.3 million visitors the same month. Google's Gmail remains a distant third, having served 62.4 million visitors last month.

However, of the three leading free e-mail services, Yahoo Mail has been growing the slowest. Between February 2006 and February 2007, worldwide traffic at Yahoo Mail grew 9%. Hotmail/Windows Live Mail grew 13% and Gmail grew 68% during the same period, according to comScore.

Unlimited storage, if unanswered by Microsoft and Google, may help Yahoo maintain its lead in the market.

"We hope we're setting a precedent for the future," said Kremer. "Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world's music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits."

It may sound like that, but limitless things often have limits, as is the case with Comcast's "All You Can Eat" broadband service. Kremer, in fact, acknowledged there will be some limits: "[L]ike any responsible Web mail service, we have anti-abuse limits in place to protect our users."

A Yahoo spokesperson declined to elaborate on limits to unlimited storage. "We do have controls in place to ensure that people benefit from the unlimited storage feature, but are not able to abuse the system," a Yahoo spokesperson said in an e-mail. "Our anti-abuse limits are there to monitor suspicious activity and to ensure our users have a safe, efficient and reliable Web mail experience. As always, we will require users to abide by the Yahoo Terms of Service. I do not have any other details to share with you at this time."

On the eve of the giant CTIA Wireless trade show in Orlando, Florida, Sprint Nextel announced that it will begin selling the UpStage in the US on 1 April. Its price will be $300, or $150 with a two-year contract, Sprint representatives say.

Unveiled in January at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), the UpStage is a chocolate-bar style handset that's less than half an inch thick and not much taller or wider than an iPod nano.

Other multimedia-friendly mobile phones struggle to balance the sometimes-conflicting requirements of a conventional handset and a music or video player. The UpStage solves this quandary by simply putting phone functions on one side of the device and the multimedia functions on the other.

Face of a phone
The UpStage's phone face has a 1.4in sliver of a colour screen, a directional toggle and a keypad - one with soft, flat keys. The music-player/multimedia side features a 2.1in, 176-by-220-pixel display and a touch-sensitive navigation pad with a central button on the other.

A small Flip button on the edge of the unit toggles between the two sides, but the prompt that confirms you want to stop playing music (on the music side of the phone) and make a phone call gets old pretty quick.

The phone side will of course spring to life for incoming calls, halting music playback; the music resumes once you disengage the call.

The UpStage felt small but solid in my hand; I found its keypad quite usable, and the sound quality on voice calls was generally good. The four-way touchpad on the music side has a central, mechanical play button that took some getting used to. The excellent documentation (including a printed manual of over 300 pages) warns against trying to swipe it in a circle the way you would an iPod's control wheel, but the temptation is hard to resist. It also took a while for me to stop trying to use the central button for directional navigation (instead of tapping the touchpad above, below, or to either side of the button).

Switching sides
Even when the music/multimedia side is activated, you'll have to use the phone side whenever you need to input text - for example, to create a playlist, search the Sprint Store's music catalog or specify a URL for a site you wish to visit in the small-screen-optimised browser.

I was a little confused the first time I encountered a text-input box on the music side, since no alphanumeric keys and no software keyboard appeared. But the device is smart enough to recognise the need to use the phone side, and I noticed that "Flip" had appeared on screen as a soft-key option.

When I used it and began entering text from the phone keypad (T9 text input mode is a welcome option here), "Save/Flip" also appeared as a soft-key option to return me seamlessly to the multimedia side.

Oracle's lawsuit accusing rival SAP of stealing proprietary information is a serious escalation in the battle between the software giants that may create fear and uncertainty among customers, some analysts say.

"Clearly it's a very fierce rivalry that just keeps getting ratcheted up," says James Kobielus, principal analyst for data management at Current Analysis. "It's not surprising they'll continue to duke it out with each other through all available channels. ... Oracle has made no bones about the fact that it covets SAP's primary standing in the business application market. SAP clearly feels the threat from Oracle on that front."

Oracle Thursday accused SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary of engaging in "systematic, illegal access" to Oracle's computerized customer support systems. TomorrowNow provides third-party maintenance and support in large part for Oracle applications drawn from its PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards product families.

Oracle's lawsuit defends against TomorrowNow "looking to undercut a major revenue stream by offering half-rate support," writes Martin Schneider, an analyst at 451 Group. But Oracle has done the same in the past, he writes in analysis issued in response to the lawsuit.

"It is interesting that Oracle has been guilty of the same kind of activity with its recent underselling of RedHat Linux support," Schneider writes. "But since the JDE and PeopleSoft products are under proprietary licenses, Oracle has much more legal recourse than RedHat. But we wonder how much (Oracle) IP SAP did gather that is really hard to come by, since most of the later PeopleSoft bug fixes and patches were built using the open source Eclipse toolkit."

Oracle's lawsuit claims that SAP illegally accessed and downloaded more than 10,000 pieces of Oracle IP off its customer portal, Schneider notes.

Vanu, Inc. the leading software radio innovator for the wireless infrastructure industry, announced today that Reed E. Hundt - former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and senior advisor on information industries to McKinsey & Company - has joined Vanu Inc. as a member of its Board of Directors.

Hundt has over 30 years experience in global politics with a strong focus on the effects of technology on emerging countries. He is also widely recognized for having negotiated the World Trade Organization Telecommunications agreement, which opened markets in 69 countries to competition and dropped barriers to foreign investment during his tenure at the FCC. Prior to his work at the FCC, Hundt was a partner in the Washington, DC office of Latham and Watkins, an international law firm. Currently, he is a Principal of Charles Ross Partners, a private investor and business advisory service. Hundt is also the author of You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics, and In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship.

“Reed’s involvement on our Board will draw upon his vast experience in working with US and international carriers which will be particularly beneficial with Vanu’s continued focus on delivering solutions to domestic rural operators and overseas emerging markets,” said Vanu Bose, President and CEO of Vanu, Inc. “His vision and insights will help us evolve strategies for new markets and applications where software radio can provide unique advantages. Reed’s role as a leader and innovator throughout the wireless field is an ideal fit with the “industry first” nature of the Vanu solution. We are extremely pleased and honored to announce the appointment of Reed Hundt to our company’s Board of Directors.”

“Vanu Inc. is a pioneer in the software radio space,” said Reed Hundt. “The company has had a series of ‘firsts’ in the wireless industry and has succeeded in doing what others thought was impossible. Vanu’s software radio has commercially delivered infrastructure solutions that provide cost-advantages today and flexible migration paths tomorrow. I am pleased to join the other members of the Vanu Board of Directors as we continue to bring a truly novel and beneficial technology to the wireless industry.”

In addition to his other accomplishments, Hundt serves as co-Chairman of The Forum on Communications and Society at the Aspen Institute and sits on the boards of directors of several companies including Intel, Pronto Networks, Tropos Networks, Polyserve, Entrisphere, and Access Spectrum. He also is a special advisor to Blackstone Group, a New York-based private equity firm, and is a member of the advisory committee at the Yale School of Management.

Hundt is a graduate of Yale College and a graduate of Yale Law School, where he was a member of the executive board of the Yale Law Journal.

About Vanu, Inc.

Vanu, Inc. is the developer of the Anywave® Base Station, the first U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-certified software radio. The Anywave Base Station provides significant advantages over traditional equipment designs including: simultaneous operation of multiple wireless standards on a single platform, the use of high volume; high performance servers rather than custom processing hardware; remote software downloads to add system capacity and migrate to future standards; decreased backhaul costs and a full range of additional capital and operating cost savings. These benefits come from implementing the high speed signal processing functions of the base station as a portable software application running on Linux, eliminating the need for specialized signal processing hardware. The company delivers Anywave radio access network solutions, licenses its software, and provides design consulting to service providers, system integrators and wireless OEMs. Vanu was founded in 1998 and is based in Cambridge, Mass. www.vanu.com

A federal judge on Friday issued a permanent injunction against Internet phone carrier Vonage (VG) for use of rival Verizon Communications' (VZ) patents.

Judge Claude Hilton said an injunction, which followed a jury decision that Vonage had infringed on three Verizon patents, is required because simply providing monetary damages "does not prevent continued erosion of the client base of the plaintiff."

Hilton said he will not enter the injunction for another two weeks while he considers Vonage's request to stay the injunction. Vonage is requesting a stay of either 120 days or until its appeal is heard.

But Verizon lawyer Dan Webb said any of Vonage's business difficulties should not be a factor in determining a stay. Webb said a stay will cause irreparable damage to Verizon because Vonage will continue to lock up the marketplace of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

Webb said New York-based Verizon has already lost hundreds of thousands of customers to its competitor. Webb said Vonage officials have spent $425 million advertising their product "so they can lock up this emerging market and we can't get a toehold in it."

The lawsuit was filed by KinderStart , a parenting information Web site that claims it was illegally blocked from Google search results.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose, Calif., not only dismissed the lawsuit but granted a motion by Google to sanction KinderStart and one of its lawyers.

Fogel said Google can now seek "reasonable compensation" for attorney fees because KinderStart lawyer Gregory Yu filed claims that were factually baseless and did not perform an adequate investigation before filing the lawsuit.

Yu's claim that Google gives higher search placements to companies that pay for that privilege "should not have been made based upon the limited information identified by Yu," Fogel wrote in a ruling issued Friday. "Yu's purported evidence is either double hearsay or hearsay speculation as to the 'mysterious' causes of improvement in a Web site's position in Google's search results. Yu provides no evidence that would support KinderStart's broad attacks on the objectivity of Google's search results."

Judge Fogel said KinderStart's allegation that Google removes Web sites from search results based on political and religious reasons was also baseless.

"KinderStart does not appear to allege that KinderStart itself suffered any discrimination by Google for political or religious reasons," Fogel wrote. "It is true that Yu spoke with a number of people who believe that Google engages in religious or political discrimination, but a reasonable, competent investigation requires more than suspicions or belief. Yu had a professional responsibility to refrain from filing such allegations if he did not have appropriate supporting evidence."

In response to the ruling, Google released a statement from Hilary Ware, the company's litigation counsel: "We always felt these claims were unjustified, because courts have consistently rejected complaints over search engine rankings, so we're pleased that Judge Fogel promptly dismissed this case."

KinderStart may still be considering further action against Google.